StarCraft - Dragoon
by SuperMudz
Summary: A brief interlude from a mighty dragoon. The first StarCraft short story I have published. Hope you enjoy.


**Dragoon**

_by SuperMudz_

The robotic protoss war machine, designated as one of their Dragoons, blundered spider-like through the brush and swiftly opened fire at an unknown target. A plasma bolt ripped through the jungle, leaving a battered flame-scorching tunnel of broken and scorched trees, debris and ferns.

Its eyes were a cluster of blue optics, diamond and insect-like, clicking faintly via some internal mechanism, as if thinking. Within the alien shell, thick neural tendrils, strong as steel-fibre cables, interlocked with the creature that lived within the womb, swimming in garish blue fluids. Its circuits ticked with energy.

It was a living machine, inhabited by the soul of the protoss that had returned from the veil of the Khala, but the face it presented was a mask that moved with the force of life hidden within.

Strange to appearance, especially to human eyes, it moved with an alacrity that was possessed only of its new form, as if it had always existed thus. The Protoss were a race of hunters as well as enlightened warriors, and there were few things they could not chase to ground. The dragoon knew no predators. The Firstborn had none, even in second life. Their spirit was one with the Khala and immortal.

The tribe of shek'lar were known thus - as hidden warriors. The chemistry that saturated the shattered form of the once powerful warrior who named himself Teth'kulas, kept its brain in state of constant heightened activity, sensitive to every khaydarin node, the psionic web that quickened it to the implicit spirit distended their race.

He had named himself in first battle, in honour of the temple mysteries of a tribal world colonised, where he had once felt the ghost of ancient templar Kethas walk among the mysteries, the artifacts and ancient knowledge, while he meditated within its sacred halls.

_Sounds and whispers._

_The life-forms moved in sacred walks abandoned long ago by their hidden masters._

The battle had been fine, and -

_It thought with many minds. The primitive rockets of the Terrans streaked their haphazard course above, and its blue optics clicked as they swerved to observe them, noting their descent of degrees._

Though they appeared ungainly in movement to clouded terran eyes, those eerie cybernetic fighting shells moved with astonishing speed. No automated system guided the globule unerringly to the mobile targets - the disruptor pulse frenzy, distorted, pulsating, moving, it was carried by the invisible hands of psionic willpower, emitted by a multitude of psi-arrays that suddenly stood out on the dragoon's carapace like hairs.

It found its enemy.

The dark templar was alive with energies the dragoon's equipment could not interpret properly. The reborn warrior detected the almost imperceptible profanity of energy that surrounded the heretic templar, drawing its energies from the coldness of between stars. It was like a shroud across existence – some dark power it had acquired in the beyond.

Glittering features dwelled within its hood like a cave shrouding jewels.

_There were places it knew of, secret places, upon this world, were it might find what it sought. Caves beyond ruinous eyes, and deeper than sensors could penetrate, where treasures of a passed age were hidden. Its senses heard what ears could not, what moved without sound._

The dark Templar was not pleased at becoming quarry, and slipped about in its home of darkness, eluding that bright search. Although it did not hate its brethren, it did not have time for them, and misfortune meets in such circumstances.

The Dragoon stalked it, although the prey was a destroyer and cold, heartless assassin from the darkness, the Dragoon was a warrior still, who had confronted and conquered the veil of death once before. The enemy disappeared.

The Dragoon activated its sensors, but they revealed nothing, and it attempted to seek out with its mind what its optics could not.

(*)

Buried beneath the roots of the ground, defilers burst out! The dragoon slew two, leaving their bodies roasted on the ground, but the third, it did not have the time.

_Was I led into an ambush? _It managed to wonder.

The defiler snaked through its shield! With a quick movement its blade edged tail cracked through its exposed appendage, with terrifying force. Together they rolled in the dust, the spidery alien latched onto the protoss' cybernetic face, beyond the reach of its weapon.

Tiny robot micro-defenses activated, and attempted to dissert and paralyse the attacker with a blast of neuroelectric disruptors, but the organism was not deterred and entered.

It cracked open the shell and snaked inside the opening to the dragoon's exposed inner body. Self-defense systems came on-line instinctively, and the alien worm was roasted alive, along with the dragoon's remaining flesh. Together, clasped into embrace, they would meet their afterlives.

Then, instinctively, the dragoon reacted psionically, and a multitude of lasers guarding its central most vulnerable body, lashed out. Dissected it into a hundred micro-pieces divided up with perfect accuracy.

The perfect organism.

It scoured and cleansed away the filth of the attack, but then the Dragoon was, incredibly, clean again. It had survived the attack that had claimed so many of its brethren. It staggered for a moment, and then recovered its equilibrium.

And it was not alone here. It could feel the life of the protoss civilisation, even here, like inescapable lights and constellations in the heavens surrounding its sensors - their spirit was with it in every assault it made. Its battle would resonate forever, every great act or mis-step would resound to its greater glory. Such things emboldened a warrior to battle. It spirit would fill the zealous soldiers of Aiur with their unquenchable will to battle.

It was a while before it found its enemy again.

The air shimmered and disappeared into the gaunt figure of a familiar enemy - a shadow from the warp tender, like bone draped in darkness, alit by the shimmering glow of its remarkable gauntlet. For a brief moment, its eye glowed, inspecting the graceless mechanical creature that stalked it. It snapped a warning or a curse in its guttural tongue, and then it left.

If the being knew fear, it was hidden even to the cybernetic dragoon, invisibly playing vibrating receptors of light over the fleeing warrior. And then leaping after with incredible velocity. It destroyed the foliage in a fifty foot radius, in order to clear a space between it and its potential foe.

With a sheer movement it toppled a tree, and with a bare whisk of movement it disappeared once more in shifting spectrums of movement.

The Dragoon's mandibles clicked and whirred, and with a brief movement of its mechanical limbs it smashed through the thick twisted alien jungle, firing bolt after plasma bolt, and the entire area around the figure erupted in blue fire and spouts of exploding earth. A display of power that would have made any living creature it knew, quail before an example of the protoss' might. But the one it hunted was like itself, although bereft of the power of the Khala, it was one of the same race, however distantly.

The Dragoon was not foolish, it knew its enemy had unknown centuries of experience spanning darkness, as a shadow hunter, a killer in the manner the Dragoon wished to kill. But this was where the light must triumph over dark, it would show that the might of Aiur existed even in its foot-soldiers – all dark things should be afraid when Aiur shined its light in the heavens.

The Dragoon's optical sensors detected no life in the shroud of bombardment, and it knew by its absence that its prey had escaped with it.

It did not find its prey, but it found one of its own warriors, slain in the prey's escape.

The protoss lay dying, one leg severed in a muck of blue liquid and escaping light to the Dragoon's artificial eyes. The Dragoon's small extensiles, like crabthean mandibles, gently rearranging the cloth on the dying being, one limb closer to another, with as much care as such animals showed to their offspring - a light of hidden power, characterised by courage and power, dimmed in its fading eyes.

A message passed between them, which took its nodes some faint precious strands of time to unravel, crackling with psionic energy inside the surface of its hull.

And there was received back another son to the Khala.

It intoned a message to the dying creature, which could not be put into words, already more empty shell than spirit. The dragoon, Teth'kulas, lifted its artificial eyes to the skies, and felt a chill run over its cybernetic heart - as the great impure fleshities and crawling defilers of the ancient Swarm, filled the sky with its abominable threat.

So great an enemy that could not be canvassed by the might of Aiur - such things the templar dragoon had not formerly known. It watched, and it thought of distant fleets that waited to scour such things from the skies of the Aiur Empire of the holy Firstborn.

(*)

By happenstance, it came across a band of humans, their soldiers, in a desperate battle against zerg attackers. They were woefully outmatched, having been caught off-guard, and the heart of the warrior that lived in that Dragoon still, felt pity. They were brave warriors, for humans, but they could not see the way to battle's victory.

Indeed, Aiur itself had fallen prey to this same mistake, but it remembered, and it could see.

The battle still did not end well, they were all slaughtered save for one. Even the Dragoon had not been able to preserve them all. Only one.

The Dragoon saved the terran human from a fatal death.

Boom. A shell exploded against its upper shield, the trees around it shook into splinters. It spotted the tank, too late. The tank blew a limb clean away. Blue fluid leaked. The Dragoon had not expected it. The humans had reinforcements after all – just too late, and too foolish.

The Dragoon felt its legs buckling. It was dying, and this time, on this far world, only the Khala would await. The tank moved on, crashing through the trees.

Although dying, it felt it, when the tank met more of protoss-kind, who converged upon it in an ambush of their own. The trees shook.

After a time, the marine got up. Recovered. For a moment he looked at the Dragoon, its shattered body. If there were questions on his mind, he never spoke them out loud.

And then he walked away.

THE END


End file.
